School of Social Science and Philosophyhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/20
School of Social Science and Philosophy

2015-03-31T18:07:57ZTrade Dimensions of Food Security, OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers, No. 77, OECD Publishing.http://hdl.handle.net/2262/73601
Trade Dimensions of Food Security, OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers, No. 77, OECD Publishing.
MATTHEWS, ALAN
This report examines the different channels through which trade openness (and reforms to achieve it)
can affect a country’s food security. The overall conclusion is that trade openness has a
positive net
impact on food security, although specific constituencies, including some poor households, could see
their immediate food security threatened by the withdrawal of trade protection. The challenge for
policymakers is to design flanking policies
which enable countries to reap aggregate gains yet mitigate
specific losses. Those policies include social protection and the provision of risk management tools,
allied with investments in productivity so that average incomes rise to the extent that any a
dverse shock
to incomes is unlikely to jeopardise food security. Developing countries are increasingly able to deploy
such targeted instruments. Lessons are also being learned with respect to the political economy of trade
reform, such that changes can be
introduced in a way that minimises adjustment stresses and helps build
the consensus needed to lock in the benefits of trade policy reform.
PUBLISHED
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZEstimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Voteshttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/73378
Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes
BENOIT, KENNETH RICHARD
Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for es-
timating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on es-
timating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call
votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and
strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indi-
cation of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since
party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the
party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain es-
sentially unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data
to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich fea-
ture of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times.
Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from
a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger
intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the dif-
ferences between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level
preferences for energy policy
PUBLISHED
2015-01-01T00:00:00ZMigrant-led activism and integration from below in recession Irelandhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/72512
Migrant-led activism and integration from below in recession Ireland
LENTIN, RONIT
Louis Brennan
PUBLISHED
2013-01-01T00:00:00ZTalking Human Rights: How social movement activists are constructed and constrained by human rights discoursehttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/72507
Talking Human Rights: How social movement activists are constructed and constrained by human rights discourse
LANDY, DAVID
Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement ? Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists ? and argues
that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies contemporary critiques of human rights to the case of Palestine, where this discourse has arguably been used to undermine Palestinians? political subjectivity and collective struggle, and
legitimise outside intervention. Nevertheless, transnational groups critical of Israel, particularly diaspora Jewish organisations, rely on a human rights frame. There are several reasons for this: it offers activists a means to achieve `cognitive liberation?, to speak about the issue and to frame their activities so as to attract recruits. The article investigates this paradoxical role of human rights, and recommends understanding it as a language which both constrains and enables the
practice of transnational solidarity.
PUBLISHED
2013-07-01T00:00:00Z